Report: Mother said Adam Lanza had 'no feelings'

Published 10:41 pm, Monday, November 25, 2013

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Adam Lanza wrote and illustrated "The Big Book of Granny" when he was in fifth grade. The story features a grandmother who shoots people with her cane and an accomplice called "GrannyâÄôs Son," who kills Granny by shooting her in the head. Another character says: "I like hurting people ... Especially children." less

Adam Lanza wrote and illustrated "The Big Book of Granny" when he was in fifth grade. The story features a grandmother who shoots people with her cane and an accomplice called "GrannyâÄôs Son," who kills ... more

Photo: Contributed Photo

Report: Mother said Adam Lanza had 'no feelings'

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NEWTOWN -- At 6-feet tall and 112 pounds, Adam Lanza cast a long shadow over his family's routine.

He shared the home on Yogananda Street with his mother, Nancy, but communicated with her entirely by email. He would only eat certain foods, which had to be arranged in a particular way, on special dishes. He couldn't stand to be touched and didn't like loud noises. The landscapers were told to never ring the doorbell or use power equipment without warning.

His needs were so extensive, his mother felt she couldn't work. His joys were few.

"He wouldn't allow his mother to put up a Christmas tree," Sedensky wrote. "The mother explained it by saying that shooter had no emotions or feelings. The mother also got rid of a cat because the shooter did not want it in the house."

His mother indulged his demands -- dutifully washing the clothes he changed more than once a day and agreeing to stay out of his room completely. Even more importantly, perhaps, she allowed him to disregard professional advice that he take medication and engage in behavior therapies.

The report paints a picture of a 20-year-old man sliding into his own violent world and a mother who was apparently clueless as to how save him.

Mary Ellen O'Toole, a now-retired senior profiler with the FBI's behavioral analysis unit who wrote a school-shooter threat perspective for the FBI after reviewing 18 separate school-shooting cases, said the warning signs were there in the Lanza home.

"One of the warnings to be aware of is who rules the roost," she said. "And Adam was clearly in charge of the home."

Lanza had not had contact with his older brother Ryan for two years before the shooting.

His father, Peter, last saw him in 2010.

"After that, the father would reach out to the shooter by mail or through emails regularly, asking him to join him at various places for different activities," the report said. "The shooter stopped responding at some point prior to December 2012."

Lanza was obsessed with violence, with school shootings. He drew up a spread sheet about mass murders. One of his few outside interests was shooting guns, and his mother's Christmas gift to him was a check to buy another gun.

"I know that people say you shouldn't say anything against her because she was murdered," Ridgefield counselor Liz Jorgensen said Monday after reading the report. "But this is a clear case of abuse and neglect."

Dr. Charles Herrick, chairman of the psychiatry department at Danbury Hospital, said while it was obvious from reading the report that Lanza was obsessed with violence, he also appeared very apt at hiding it from people.

"There was such inconsistency in terms of what he revealed to others that it would be a challenge for anyone to pull it all together and determine what made him tick," he said.

The 44-page summary Sedensky released Monday -- the complete State Police report may run thousands of pages when it is eventually released -- shows a timeline of how Lanza got up Dec. 14, dressed in black, shot his mother while she was sleeping, then went to Sandy Hook Elementary and shot 20 first-graders and six educators before killing himself.

But it also provides a look at Lanza as he slowly spiraled out of the real world and became increasingly isolated from society.

"It is known that the shooter had significant mental-health issues that affected his ability to live a normal life and to interact with others, even with those to whom he should have been close," the report states.

Lanza was diagnosed in 2005 with Asperger's syndrome and found to have significant social impairments.

"It was also noted that he lacked empathy and had a very rigid thought process."

About a year later, the report states, he was identified as having pervasive developmental disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and high anxiety. Tutoring, desensitization and medication were recommended, but Lanza did not follow up.

But the report also shows that even early in life, Lanza was troubled.

While attending fifth grade at Sandy Hook Elementary, he wrote and illustrated a book for a school project that he never handed in. "The Big Book of Granny" features a grandmother with a lethal gun and a disturbing foretelling of violence against children.

"In the first chapter, Granny and Granny's Son rob a bank," an excerpt of the book reads. "After the robbery, Granny's Son shoots Granny in the head with a shotgun."

Later, another character in the book says, "I like hurting people ... Especially children."

Some reports of Lanza were contradictory.

In the sixth grade, the report said, his teacher described Lanza as being "normal with no oddities."

In seventh grade, however, his teacher reported he was obsessed with battles, destruction and war, and the level of violence in his writing was disturbing.

He also wrote a lovely poem for the class, the teacher reported.

Lanza went to Newtown High School and was classified as a special education student. He had periods of home schooling because his extreme social difficulties and anxiety made it a challenge to walk through the school halls. He also had unspecified, nonviolent "episodes," that required his mother to come to school. He graduated in 2009.

It was when Lanza began attending high school that he appeared to become more isolated, Herrick said.

"High school is when people really start establishing their identity as a person," he said. "And here is a kid who couldn't establish an identity for himself because he became increasingly isolated and unable to create a network of supporters other than his mother."

As a result, Herrick said, Lanza probably had more difficulty reaching out to others, and in fact, since his mother provided everything he wanted, "he didn't have to."

Lanza, apparently, had at least one acquaintance. From 2011 until about a month before the Sandy Hook shooting, he went every weekend to a theater in Danbury that had a video game called "Dance, Dance Revolution," on which players follow video instructions and dance. From 2011 through 2012, he and the unnamed acquaintance would routinely play the DDR game and occasionally see a movie.

"He went most every Friday through Sunday and played the game for four to 10 hours," the report says.

But area psychologists acknowledge it's difficult to deal with an adult who refuses treatment.

Charles Manos, the Brookfield school system's director of special education and support services said family members are often too close to see how extreme the behavior is.

Manos, however, took issue with one point of the report when Lanza was diagnosed with Asperger's, a form of autism. He said people with autism are almost never violent toward others.

"It makes me think there were other things involved or that he was misdiagnosed," Manos said.

What's clear, John Thomas, a professor at the Quinnipiac University School of Law and an expert on mental health and gun violence said, is that with all the material Lanza collected on school shootings and violence, he was intent on carrying out such an attack. No one knows why he picked Sandy Hook Elementary School, but it was premeditated.

"It took a lot of planning," he said.

Herrick said the photograph of a dead body and other images, including a photo of Lanza holding a handgun to his head, were likely part of the shooter "preparing himself for what he'll experience."

"He was doing dry runs in a sense so that he could master his emotions when he ultimately executes his act," he said.

Herrick added the attack may have stemmed from a need for attention, particularly because of Lanza's isolation, "even if that meant taking his own life. To him that seemed to have been secondary."

What the report shows, experts say, is how important it is for family members to intervene in cases where someone is showing this extreme disconnect and unwillingness to take part in the world.

"There are 100 missed opportunities here," Jorgensen said of how Lanza never got the help he needed. "Opportunities that show this didn't need to happen."